Alan Nixon has dropped a fresh update on the Sunderland manager race.
Sunderland are approaching the three-month mark since the club sacked Michael Beale, and the Black Cats still don’t have a clear front-runner for the job.
Mike Dodds‘ interim spell has now finished and he leaves Sunderland in a pretty sorry state, following a 16th place finish in the Championship.
In the end, the Black Cats finished the campaign just six points above the drop zone after claiming five wins since the turn of the year.
Names continue to be linked with the Sunderland job including Will Still, Danny Rohl, Rene Maric, and Paul Heckingbottom to name a few, with Bo Svensson a newly emerging candidate.
Though some names seem further ahead in the running than others, and now Nixon has dropped a somewhat vague update on the matter.
Alan Nixon drops Sunderland manager update
Posting on X, journalist Nixon has revealed that he’s ‘heard something’ that may suggest there’s ‘more than one candidate’ for the Sunderland job this summer.
As things stand, Still seems like an obvious front-runner given the fact that he left Reims at the start of May, whilst the likes of Maric and Rohl’s links to Sunderland have weakened in the past week.
Heckingbottom’s name has come back into headlines recently, along with Svensson, so it seems clear that Sunderland owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus is weighing up a number of options as things stand.
Nixon posted on X:
One key worry emerging in Sunderland manager race
To get to this point; three months after Beale’s exit and coming up to two weeks since the season ended, and not having a front-runner, suggests that Sunderland really don’t know what they’re looking for in their next manager.
The criteria reported in the media seems ill-defined; fans have constantly heard about Sunderland wanting a younger coach, likely from Europe, but then there was claims that Heckingbottom was the club’s no.1 candidate.
It seems, now, that whoever Sunderland hires as their next manager will come as a surprise, even if it’s someone like Still with his links to Wearside having gone slightly cold.
But if Nixon’s update tells us anything it’s that the club aren’t really close to hiring a new boss, which will worry Sunderland fans who’ll want to see the club press on with summer transfers and pre-season, with a manager in place.
And there might yet be new names coming into the running to become the next Sunderland manager, with Svensson’s recently emerging links showing us that Sunderland might have a widely cast net.